Michael "Floss Like a Boss" Beschloss is definitely in the house today. MB is a useful guest for his churning hand movements, which "constantly historicize"—he is a Presidential historian, you see. He is constantly massaging the present back into the larger lump of clay we call Time/History...I think that one big ole UNORDERED LIST IS IN ORDER??

DUDERSTEIN IS GETTING LAUGHED OFF THE MTP SET FOR SAYING—"Every President deserves a Mulligan!". Ronald Reagan "Did not trade arms for hostages". Bill Clinton "Did not have sexual relation with that woman". Politicians often lie and then get caught in those lies, and these lies provide a lot of work for people like Leo Panetta/Hank Duderstein.

Duberstein re: Miers nomination/Bush indeptedness 2 Da Right Radical Right thought Reagan was their darling too back in the 80s...he sometimes 'let them down'. what Reagan learned was "the Radical Right doesn't want to be satisfied. They want to be discontent so that they can raise money on that discontent". hmm...that is kinda crazy!!!

every time Beschloß is asked a question it begins with "Michael, what does history tell us about _____________" Beschloss says a troubled president should find something in their heart they really care about and are good at, throw themself into that. Look for Bush II Golf Initiatives coming down the pipe.

OK...commercial break. Is any of this making any sense? I am live-blogging Meet the Press, 10/30/05. With the indicitment of Scooter Libby there is a lot of political news about. Tim Russert says he is going to discuss e'erything, including the involvement of "yours truly"after the commercial break

I am getting stoked about the upcoming panel of talkin' headz. it looks like Judy Wood-Ruff, David "Old Bill Sykes" Brooks, David "Robert Frost" Broder,y uno más—UPDATE: WILLIAM 'STUDS TERKEL/NOODLES from UHF' SAFIRE

Broder slowly, angrily pronounces "DISREMEMBER"

Safire is hacking around with his machete, slowly dying, uttering Talking Points on his death bed. rough quote "Most important point is the charges weren't what the investigation started with" [knowingly outing a CIA agent, whatev.]...obstruction of justice, perjury, etc. aren't crimes according 2 Bill Safire. this is revenge from the CIA. FUCK YOU, BILL SAFIRE! "Coverup of a non-crime"...what a fucking asshole

During the Fitzgerald press conference, WHICH I HIGHLY RECOMMEND WATCHING ON C-SPAN, spec. invest. Fitzgerald explains why what Safire just said was bullshit. Judy Woodruff gladly caLLs bullshit on this.

David Brooks!!! "Was there a dark, lurking conspiracy within the White House?...—NO!" he says "we do not have a cancer on the Presidency...if there would have been 5 indictments, it would have been over for them". this is lame damage control [w. characteristic D. Brooks pause/chuckle/headshakes]

David Broder thankfully disagrees with David Brooks. "War in Iraq is a bleeding wound".

Brooks: "Disease is not corruption...this is not Watergate" umm...yeah David!!! "it's isolation and exhaustion"

Safire [slowwwwly]: "the great thing about the 'Narrative' is that it changes...Narrative will be the Comeback...great news like Iraq constituion does not get reported because it is not part of the Narrative"...gee Bill...that sounds like a really good, intriguing...NARRATIVE

we've hit a slow patch, though Russert did show a really awesome 1988 clip of Richard Nixon on MTP saying "you are totally fucked in your 2nd term. I was, Harry Truman was, Reagan sorta was...". Panel was laughing when they cut back to them, as if remembering the hilarious days when an angry, old Richard Nixon still haunted television

oops...it's all over. Meet the Press is actually only like 50 mins. long. they wound down with some "1st amendment" issues. Tim Russert "felt uncomfortable" talking to a grand jury about his source. NBC resisted in court, but he had to testify. Bill Safire criticizes that while Patrick Fitzgerald is a media darling now, what is he actually doing and is it really a matter of National Security. I AM PEACE-ing THE F()CK OUT, SO...U DECIDE 2005...I am going to watch fuzzy Fiorentina v. Cagliari on awesome channel 25 now...hugz

There were so many calls that the city's Office of Emergency Management coordinated efforts with the Police and Fire Departments, the Coast Guard and the City Department of Environmental Protection to find the source of the mysterious smell.

Air tests haven't turned up anything harmful, but the source was still a mystery.

so lemme go on the record and say last night, near Wallabout Bay, I distinctly noticed the smell of maple syrup in the air!!! this is insane!!! I didn't really think much of it last night, much less assume that it was a metropolis-wide phenomenon!!! as one Gothamist commentator says: "Everyone speculates that a pancake truck or maple syrup factory has caught on fire."CONFIRM/DENY YOUR PERSONAL NYC SMELL HUNCHES IN THE COMENTARIOS, PLEASE!!!

26/10/05

Hi, this is a guest post from Georgia. IS it an authorized guest post? YOU DECIDE!!! (question: is using three exclamation points okay? I put three exclamation points in a memo at work once and someone edited them out!!!)

I read this article in NY POST that some school in Bronx gives their students "School Bucks" and then they can use the money to buy stuff like tickets to the homecoming dance and pencils, and since they did it attendance is WAY better or whatever, so I was thinking about pretend money... the kids I used to babysit for had pretend, soft, plush pretend briefcases. With pretend watches.

I saw someone dressed up for a job interview, sitting in the lobby of the office waiting to be interviewed... he was sitting down wearing a weird suit. His pants were too short and they were riding up. It was a winter suit...he was wearing loafers with no socks. You could see his bare ankles, and I was thinking that because of this he would not get the job.

Students will be "paid" pretend money for going to school. They will be "paid" $7.00 per hour for 7 hours of school each day. Students will punch in on a time clock when they come to school in the mornings and they will punch out in the afternoon when leaving school for the day. Students will also punch in and out when going to appointments not related to school, when they go to the nurse and when they leave the school building for unrelated activities.

24/10/05

I bought a cup of Jacques Torres hot chocolate ($2.50) tonight after I left the Cabinet office at 6:15. By the time I took a drink of the hot chocolate it was 6:30. I thought about walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to J&R Music, a large store very close to the Manhattan end of the bridge, but it was raining and the store closes at 7:00, so I decided not to chance it. Had I left the office at 6:00 (as planned) I'd have made it to the store with time to spare. How long does it take to walk across the Brooklyn bridge?

After I got my hot chocolate I walked to Peas & Pickles, the grocery store adjacent to Cabinet's office building, and got some rice cracker mix. I ate the cracker mix and drank the hot chocolate, enjoying the pair. The sum was greater than the parts (and the parts themselves were pretty good). I walked to the Court Street Barnes & Noble and read some of Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone interview with Bono. In the interview, Bono said he's annoyed that U2's latest album, as a whole, is not greater than the sum of its parts. I looked at a copy of Premiere magazine and noted the Art Director's name: Dirk. I asked at the B&N information desk whether anyone knew of a large music store nearby, or anywhere in Brooklyn. No: Brooklyn has no large music stores. (But wait. Isn't there a Sam Goody or something in Brooklyn Heights? I think there's still a WaldenBooks in Brooklyn Heights.)

Near the corner of Smith & Court, I saw a bus that said "Park Slope" (my neighborhood) on it. I hardly ever take the bus. I don't know where the buses go. Why is it easier to remember the subway routes than the bus routes? It was raining, so I got on the bus. Ten minutes later I got off the bus at 7th Avenue & 9th Street. (It would have taken me about half an hour to walk the distance I rode.) In Williamsburg, Brooklyn I once saw Adam Gopnik read an insightful New Yorker essay about the New York City bus system. I don't remember the main point of the essay, but one of the side points was that passengers on NYC buses are chatty in a way that subway passengers aren't. Another side point he made was, "Isn't it funny that nobody can think of a film scene that takes place on a New York City bus?"

After posing that zinger of a rhetorical question, A.G. followed up with a hilario-erudite remark that some movie does in fact feature an NYC bus... but the bus is painted to look like some other city's bus. Thus the point about NYC buses' absence from film is underscored and totally slammed home. Is Adam Gopnik a brilliant researcher? He must be at least really solid. Without solid research, how could he have confidently witticized about the dearth of NYC buses on film? Good essayists are full of funny, intensely researched-seeming maraschino cherry-topper facts like "the one film scene featuring an NYC bus appears to feature a Chicago bus.&quot

After I got off the bus I wandered into a used bookstore on 7th Avenue where I saw an unread-looking copy of the Paper Sculpture Book on a shelf within six feet of an unread-looking copy of Jonathan Ames's Sexual Metamorphosis. Then I came home and Katie showed me the copy of Dancing Star 26 she found today in a giveaway box on a curb just a few blocks from our house. Dancing Star 26 is the boxed literary/art magazine I edited & designed in Indiana in 2001 & 2002. I only made about 540 copies, 526 of which were numbered. The copy Katie found down the street is #478, and the contents are all present and unread-looking.

22/10/05

This article delighted me. I have a common cold, and want to call all yawl but am going to wait a little while until I'm less foggy. I am going to go shopping and then try to beat the common cold. Update, several hours later: I did none of these things.

I hate righteousness. I also hate the thing -- I don't think it's righteousness, necessarily -- where people point at the sunset and say "look at the sunset. It is so beautiful. Look at it, will you? Wow." Telling me to look at the sunset carries the implication, I often think, that I've been too busy thinking about myself to notice the sunset, and it took you, my more enlightened friend, to point it out in order to pull my snout from the feed-bag and notice it.

Anyway, it seems like we should probably send a bunch of money to Pakistan, because, as the NYT points out, "The tsunami, though it killed four times as many people, displaced only a third as many as the quake in Pakistan did, and the delivery of aid was far simpler on flat terrain close to the sea. The number of homeless here dwarfs even the two million displaced by the strife in the Darfur region of Sudan. The Persian Gulf war of 1991 turned 1.5 million Iraqi Kurds into refugees in a matter of days." Um and also in "perhaps the starkest statement of need, there are not enough cold-weather tents in the world to house what the International Organization for Migration estimates to be up to 550,000 families left homeless by the quake. The snow will surely come before enough can be made."
I had the same thought when I read about the Tsunami, and the famine in Niger: Especially with the famine, there's the same thing where Jan over at the U.N. is quoted a lot as saying that the international response has been incredibly insufficient and pathetic and insulting; when he says "international response," he's talking about me and... you. In addition to our government and other governments. Right? "Isn't that sunset just breathtaking?" So I decide to give some money to someone, to bolster the international response. But then the question of where to put my money. The NYT reccommended using GuideStar to help figure out which charities were worth donating to. Then you read about charities making blunders and I have a sore throat.

Sat down with this week's NYer this morning from my miasma-womb. Kent Campbell, a former chief of the malaria branch at the CDC: "I don't think most Americans give a rat's ass about the death of millions of African kids each year. I don't think they ever have." Later in the same article, An entomologist with Tanzania's National Institute for Medical Research: "we already know how much eight hundred thousand African children are worth to the rich world. We have known it for a long time."

Why don't most Americans care about global poverty and suffering? How do you make a winterproof tent? How does one spend one's money intelligently, to help the most people the most? The NYer article quoted above is about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the way they choose to spend their money. They take a practical approach, calculating how many people a disease, for example, kills, and how little research is already devoted to it, and what the potential number of lives saved are. But they also focus more on risky technological advancements rather than short-term passing-out-mosquito-nets-type aid.

I'm not going to quit my job in order to study mosquitos to try to figure out how to create a Malaria vaccine that will last a child's entire life. But I am also not helping end suffering/disease/etc in the world by throwing $100 at Oxfam every time Jan Englund I mean Jan Egeland, UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator chastizes the Western world for ignoring catastrophes.

In conclusion, as student body president I feel that I will be able to assess the needs of the school and react quickly, working with -- and without -- the administration in order to make the cogs of daily life at school spin with the freewheeling, productive anxiety upon which we have come to rely.

soooooooo. MOMA is having an Isabelle Huppert retrospective. A
casual google image search reacquaints me with her face...though, wow, I really
have not seen *any* of the movies she has appeared in. I have not seen Haneke's The Piano Teacher. I
didn't even see J'Adore
Huckabees!!! If I had to write some 'copy' for a catalog to accompany
Isabelle Huppert's google image search results: 1979, France fell in love
with what they thought was sure to be their Jodie Foster. They were sure
of it! Thousands of metres of film later, you have a beatiful escort to the
opera—but does your companion have a horrible secret/disturbing interior
monologue/glassy countenance that refuses to yield a inch
centimeter!?? Thank You...these MOMA
program notes NOTE THAT "her ability to make silences revelatory is
astonishing". * THAT MEANS TURN OFF ALL CELL PHONES BEFORE THE SCREENING,
PEOPLE!!! *.

I reckon this is spose 2 coincide with Huppert's current performance/American stage premiere @
BAM—Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychose ["a
breathtakingly visceral rollercoaster ride through the playwright’s private
hell" !!!]. I bet some of our readers have attended this performace and may even elaborate on this experience in our comentarios!!! And yes!, the Huppert retrospective includes a screening of her
most newest film, Gabrielle
(2005), which is a 'narrative non-fiction' film about Gabrielle
Carteris's recent involvement with a radical, anti-Cedar Revolution
student newspaper in Lebanon.

Q: IS A BULLETED LIST THE BEST WAY TO PRESENT MY
'PERSONAL ANNOTATIONS' OF POSSIBLY FUN FILMS-TO-SEE?: A:NO. OK...I guess if everyone who wants to maybe go to one of these movies would please fill out the form below, we can create some expeditionary groups..

I have seen several Claude Chabrol films from the 1960s. What about his later work...hell, even his 1990s films?[go see La Cérémonie 10/22 & 10/26; Madame Bovary 10/29, 11/2; Une Affaire de femmes 11/13, 11/17, Violette Nozière 11/13, 11/18]
As an undergraduate, I made a "student film" which was a parody of a then-famous Budweiser commercial. It aggressively punned on the name of Polish director Andrzej Wajda.[go see Les Possédés 11/12, 11/14]
I have seen every single Jean-Luc Godard film from his early shorts, through his late 70s video work. I am terrified of proceeding beyond 1978 in his filmography.
[go see Sauve qui peut (la vie) 10/22, 10/23; Passion 11/12, 11/16]
I seek out films that are both romantic and excessively erotic. Marcello Mastroianni and Hanna Schygulla represent my personal ideals of gendered beauty.
[go see La Storia di Piera 11/3]
I am curious as to the state of the Hollywood-big-budget-studio-epic ~1980. I have no plans for Halloween.
[go see Heaven's Gate 10/31 * introduced by Huppert! *]